


The Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known

by skullduggery



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Character Study, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Canon Fix-It, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-22
Updated: 2020-04-22
Packaged: 2021-03-01 16:35:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 20,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23790166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skullduggery/pseuds/skullduggery
Summary: "...if we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known."Or, Harrowhark Nonagesimus' first week as a lyctor is full of growing pains and messy emotions. It's hard catching feelings for someone after they've died. It's hard and nobody understands.
Relationships: Gideon Nav & Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Comments: 15
Kudos: 142





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Does the ending of a book ever devastate you so thoroughly that you can't hope to lay your tortured soul to rest until you've written 20k words of slow-burn catharsis to process it? Cause that's what happened here.
> 
> This work is canon-compliant for Gideon the Ninth, but I was already 2/3 done with it when Harrow the Ninth Act 1 dropped, and decided to finish & publish the fic as is. May be retconned to fit HT9 canon eventually, may not!
> 
> CW for Ch. 1: light self-harm/self-destructive behavior.

* * *

“ _ One need not be a Chamber--to be Haunted-- _  
_ One need not be a House-- _  
_ The Brain has Corridors--surpassing _  
_ Material Place-- _ ”

— Emily Dickinson, “Poem 670”

* * *

God himself, the Undying Emperor, gave Harrowhark a tour of the Mithraeum. Ianthe the First hadn’t woken from surgery yet, he explained, and he wanted to personally ensure that his new lyctors felt at home. Harrow drifted after him like a hobby horse on a string, painted on eyes staring without seeing. Like she had at Canaan House, she memorized the flagship’s layout with detached fascination, not yet fully comprehending that she lived here now.

God had given her a floor-length black velvet cloak to wear over her hospital gown, and it whispered like a living shadow while she walked, muffling the faint squish of the adhesive-soled socks she’d woken up in. The odd combination of garments made her feel like a doll, dressed in the costume of her house.

The Mithraeum did not feel like a starship, possessing none of the bare industrial functionality from the shuttles she’d been in before. Its hallways knotted together in a jumble of architectural styles, much like Canaan House, but unlike Canaan, it was clean and well-maintained. Beneath the lavish decor, the walls were most likely pressurized metal, and they were undoubtedly walking over a utilitarian network of service tunnels and hidden arteries that powered the ship and gave the servant constructs access to all the delicate instruments that made FTL travel possible.

Each wing of the ship was cluttered with the spoils of intergalactic war: art in a thousand regional styles from many thousands of years past, gilded relics and unfamiliar icons that watched them pass from impeccably dusted glass cases. On their way to her quarters, Harrow’s feet trod upon mosaics tiled in precious stone, exotic hardwoods, and hand-woven rugs with a dozen intricate patterns. 

More like a mansion than a military-grade deep space vessel, the Mithraeum held a multitude of rooms, with each level feeling like its own private world. Nearest the medical wing were the kitchens, ossuary, and private quarters for living staff. A few lower decks were responsible for ship maintenance and power, while the navigation, command center, and God’s private quarters made a fortified penthouse of the top decks. Harrow learned where formal imperial business took place -the grand, gilded rooms you saw on postcards and in textbooks- but was advised to keep clear of the throne room and accompanying offices without an invitation. The middle decks were where Harrow would spend much of her time, God told her. They passed long corridors of sterile steel-and-white-tile laboratories and testing rooms, much like Canaan House’s facility (minus ten thousand years of neglect). Harrow caught sight of and drifted towards an improbably large library, silent rows of packed shelves stretching off into shadow, but God gently steered her away by the elbow. They passed a spacious and well-equipped training wing that Gideon would have  _ loved _ , with weights, sparring mats, running track, a gleaming armory, swimming pool, and a deadly looking obstacle course that Harrow would probably break her neck on. Beyond this, there were a few cozy common areas, and then the private apartments that were maintained for each surviving lyctor, though many lived and worked away from the Mithraeum most of the time.

Halfway down the hall, God stopped in front of an unadorned, heavy door in dark oak, with a small bronze plaque at eye level that read:  _ Harrowhark Nonagesimus the First. _ Not the Ninth, not the Reverend Daughter of Drearburh. Harrowhark, necrosaint of the First House. God handed her a skeleton key shaped from a jawbone: its teeth were actual teeth, which fit perfectly into the lock, and the handle, knobby and uneven, rested in Harrow’s palm with familiar, comforting weight.

Harrow’s rooms looked uncannily like her home back in the Ninth House, though cleaner, warmer, and far less decrepit. The front door opened into a spacious salon, with darkly upholstered clawfoot furniture positioned sociably around what looked to be a real, functional hearth. The floor was also done in real hardwood, which, in the half-light provided by several flickering lamps, glistened like fresh blood.

“Just like Drearburh,” Harrow mustered, trying to sound grateful. She wasn’t sure why she'd expected it to look like her and Gideon’s rooms at Canaan House, all dusty slats of sunlight and salt-rimed plaster.

The Emperor smiled warmly, the corners of his unusual eyes crinkling, and began to show her around. As befitting for a Ninth House necromancer, much of the decor was done in bone and black drapery, with a few dour, bleak landscapes in heavy gilt frames to brighten the mood. There were two doors off the main room, and a shallow tile alcove with a sink that could be purposed as a kitchenette, though the assumption was clearly that most lyctors don’t deign to cook for themselves. Through one door, there was a private study which contained a desk and two tall, narrow bookshelves pre-stocked with osseous material, various necromantic reagents, and a well-curated collection of texts for Harrow to peruse.

“You have ten myriads of learning to catch up on if you’re to match your fellow lyctors, but you’ll meet your teachers shortly and they’ll point you to the most logical starting place,” God informed her as he swept her into the bedroom.

This, at least, was perfectly to Harrow’s tastes. The bedroom was a simple, small chamber containing only a large four-poster bed dressed in a plush down duvet, a nightstand at each end of the headboard, and a globe-shaped reading lamp which hung above the bed in a spidery nest of bone that cast odd shadows around the room. The floors were cold, polished stone, with shaggy, dense furs serving as rugs beside the bed. Across the room was a reinforced porthole that looked out on the blackness of space. Through it, Harrow could see the faint blue-tinged band of an asteroid belt impossibly far away. 

Off the bedroom, there was a small, serviceable bathroom done in smoked glass and black marble, with both a sonic and a water bath. All of her bone jewelry has been brought ahead of her and was displayed on little hooks and shelves and dishes by the mirror. There was a walk-in closet already stocked with long black robes that Harrow knew, with a twinge of discomfort, would somehow fit her measurements exactly. All told, the suite provided exactly enough space for one person to live comfortably. One person, alone. There was no space in any of the corners for a stubborn cavalier to make a nest of blankets and skin mags in, no room on the bathroom shelves for two sets of toiletries. Just Harrow.

“It will serve me well, Most Gracious Emperor. Thank you.” Harrow’s voice sounded hollow and unconvincing, but the Emperor either didn’t notice or didn't mind.

“I suppose you’ll be wanting to settle in now,” he said tactfully. “I’ve allotted three constructs to do your bidding. Simply pull one of these cords,” he gestured to the purple velvet tassels hanging near the doorway in each room, “to summon them if there’s anything you need, or if there’s anything in the rooms that’s not to your liking. Once poor Miss Tridentarius is back on her feet, we will begin catching the two of you up to speed, together.”

Harrow nodded her thanks again. Suddenly, she wanted nothing more than to be alone, to find some way to tether herself to this place. To her new, eternal, life.

God paused at the front door. “Oh, and Harrow dear, I will be taking breakfast in the second floor study tomorrow at First Bell, if you’d be amenable enough to join me.” 

Harrow accepted the invitation with another overly formal platitude, her voice high and reedy with stifled emotion.

When the door thumped shut behind him, Harrow immediately peeled the itchy hospital gown from her skin and crawled into her new bed. The mattress sank to form a luxurious depression around her when she curled herself up tight in its center, and the duvet’s lavish folds wrapped her in a soothing, silky compress. The sheets smelled brisk and herbal, like whatever detergent the constructs here washed them with, but as her body heat warmed them, that gave way to a drowsy sweetness. It was unfamiliar, but not unpleasant.

Harrow had intended to spend most of her night plotting her next course of action, but the fight at Canaan House was finally catching up to her. Something like molten lead had put a vice around her heart and was seeping between her ribs. The burning weight of it was paralytic, pinning her to the extremely comfortable mattress. What would be the point of moving? This was the first day, not counting those she’d been unconscious for, of her lyctorhood. Day one of a life that would span days uncountable, endless years and myriads of, what? This?

Harrow always thought of herself as a recluse, someone who thrived in solitude and worked best alone. Now she was realizing that had only been true because she’s always had the  _ option  _ of company when she wanted it, and simply chose not to accept it most of the time. Harrow could comfortably spend days by herself, but one of the few constants in her life, the presence she could always sniff out when she needed someone to torment, or talk to, or simply sit next to and breathe…

She was gone.

Her Griddle was gone.

There was nobody here but Harrow, and a bunch of skeletons, and it seemed like a cruel joke that she’d ever thought that could be enough.

Grief, senseless and numb, teased its hooks into her lungs, tugged, and after what could have been hours or mere minutes, finally dragged her into a fitful, uneasy sleep.

* * *

_ All her life, Harrowhark Nonagesimus has only ever had one dream that she could remember, a nightmare about the Locked Tomb. It begins with her rolling away the stone. _

_ The interior of the Locked Tomb is very much alive, though it houses something that will hopefully continue to enjoy death’s embrace until Dominicus’ supernova. From the physical structure of the crypt all the way to the very air itself, centuries upon centuries of necromantic binding have given the tomb a sort of unnerving awareness. _

_ It recognizes her, and though she still has to pick her way step by agonizing, eternal step through its traps to the sarcophagus, the resistance she feels is familiar, even encouraging. As fresh air swells in to disturb ten thousand years of cold, dank dust, Harrow struggles to breathe. She cannot make a sound, cannot risk waking that which lies upon a slightly raised dais in the center of a moat of salt water. _

_ Harrow creeps closer, and she’s had this dream before, every night since her parents died, so she knows exactly what is going to happen. She will take the final step, she will peek over the rim of the sarcophagus to view the corpse imprisoned through glass made of pure thanergy. When her gaze finally settles on the girl’s unspeakable face, her eyes will be half-open, awake, watching. The head will twitch towards her, just a fraction, and Harrow will wake up with her heart pounding, drenched in sweat. _

_ Tonight is no exception, but Harrow is exhausted, and mourning. She wants this over with, so she stalks as quickly as she can up the steps to the dais, takes a deep breath, and looks directly into the face of-- _

_ “Hey, quit watching dead girls sleep, you creep.” _

* * *

Harrow gasped and thrashed herself upright, blinking furiously. The afterimage of the dream was burned onto the backs of her eyelids- flaming red hair and warm amber eyes like honey in sunlight. Gideon Nav’s face, grinning up at her from within the Locked Tomb, propped on one elbow in what she probably thought was a sexy pose.

Harrow realized she was hyperventilating, her shoulders trembling and her face damp and swollen. Was she crying?

Oh, fuck. Yes, she was crying. And realizing this fact, she couldn’t seem to stop. Harrow pulled one of her new bed’s many pillows to her chest and screamed into it, covering her leaking eyes with her palms. She hugged herself tight, and sobbed, and sobbed, and sobbed. The self-conscious bully in the back of her mind cringed at how much she sounded like Coronabeth when she cried: snotty, blubbering, shrill hysterics.

“You’re not supposed to  _ be _ there!” Harrow wailed, and didn’t know whether or not to expect a response. The room was silent aside from her messy snuffling, and the steady chug of the ship’s inner workings, several decks below. She took a deep, shuddering breath and hiccuped through a few more sobs. “That’s  _ my _ nightmare, asshole. Get your own!”

Gideon didn’t have a witty retort to that, because Gideon was dead. Harrow threw her snot-soggy pillow across the room and keened, clawing at her sternum till there was red under her fingernails. Try as she might, she couldn’t rake Gideon’s presence to the surface, and wasn’t even sure she _wanted_ to face the woman she’d all but murdered. She felt  _ nothing _ , a vast, choking emptiness, and it was worse than any pain.

When she’d cried herself into submission, Harrow slunk off the end of the bed and wrapped herself in the cloak the Emperor gave her. Still hiccuping pathetically under her breath, Harrow dragged her berobed self into the bathroom and began filling the tub. Gideon had never quite gotten used to the luxury of running water at Canaan House, unnerved by the waste and wetness of it, but Harrow had taken to it like a fish. She had always loved water, eager even for solemn trips with her parents to the ceremonial pool, because the salinity let her float with her ears underwater, listening to the muffled concern of her parents discussing House matters while she was gently buffeted by cool ripples. Water baths never made her feel as clean as a good sonic, but it was more about the experience, which Harrow considered something of a decadent guilty pleasure.

She ran the water as hot as it would go, steam choking the small room, and sank into the deep stone tub with a sigh.

Obviously, Gideon’s soul was inside her somewhere, likely rummaging through the private drawers of her subconscious and having a real laugh about it. But Harrow couldn’t feel it, couldn’t sense where she ended and her cavalier began. Theoretically, this meant their ascension had been flawless, and Harrow should feel proud. Ianthe seemed to have been split down the middle with Naberius Tern when she killed him, though it made sense, given that he likely hadn’t seen it coming, and wouldn’t have consented if he had. But even Cytherea, who said her cavalier was sacrificed willingly, had mentioned that it took centuries for that soul to settle inside her.

Harrow took a deep breath, slipped her head underwater, and was very still. Her insides churned with unrest, and her heart was a stone rattling around her ribs as it grieved, but all that disturbance belonged to Harrowhark Nonagesimus alone. There was nothing of Gideon Nav’s luminous swagger, not even a whisper of her voice, just Harrow’s lungs beginning to ache for oxygen.

When she finally surfaced, sorrow had given way to frustration and resentment. All her life, Harrow had craved lyctorhood above all else, no matter the cost, and it was infuriating now that she had it, the cost turned out being the one thing in her life she would never have sacrificed.

“Fine then,” she said to Gideon’s soul, wherever it was hiding. “Ignore me, see if I care. I’m going to have breakfast with the King Undying himself, and you can’t have any because your stomach’s probably being picked apart by bottom feeders off the shores of Canaan House.”

After draining the bath, Harrow blew her nose, scrubbed her face, and dressed in plain black robes from her new closet, much finer than her Drearburh finest. These robes were actually starless void black, not streaked grey from too many washings and mendings, and the fabric was weightless and soft against her skin. Someone has considerately left a pot of white paint and a fat stick of char beneath the mirror for her, and she used it gladly to paint on her best face.

The leering skull mask in the mirror stared at her with eyes like chips of frozen coal. This person looked powerful and confident, like someone who knew what she wanted and how to get it.  _ Are you the sort of person who cries herself awake and talks to her dead cavalier? _ Harrow asked the mirror, and the steely face staring back shook her head.  _ Not a chance _ , it said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fic Title Credit: "I Know What You Think Of Me" by Tim Kreider
> 
> Kudos n' comments always welcome! ;) I've given this a few rounds of copyediting, but it hasn't seen a fresh pair of eyes yet. If you spot any typos/inconsistencies/glaring mistakes/etc, please feel free to point them out!


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW for Ch. 2: brief self-harm, non-sexual use of a sex toy, canon-typical references to childhood trauma.

* * *

“ _What does the God of your childhood look like?_  
_A soft apparition pigeoned in the attic,_  
_a wound eating you one year at a time? If you could_  
_destroy the story before it started, would you—_  
_go back—before the unnameable thing?_ ”

— Rachel McKibbens, “outhouse”

* * *

It did not take Harrowhark long to decide that she could not trust the Undying Emperor, God of the Nine Houses. The morning after her first conscious night on the Mithraeum, he served her an assortment of tiny breakfast pastries, some savory, some sweet, on delicate bone china plates painted with green pastures. He asked her how she slept, what she thought about her new rooms, told her which rare citrus gave the scones their zest.

The food was delicious, and God was surprisingly easy company. He had a storyteller’s voice, rich and expressive, which made even banal small talk feel like deep conversation. Then abruptly, about halfway through their meal, Harrow stumbled on her words, and found herself looking over the edge of a precipice in their conversation. Somehow, God had lulled her into a chatty state, and walked her right to the brink of spilling one of her many precious secrets.

Harrow took a larger-than-comfortable bite of something God had called a “berelnut-bran muffin” to buy herself thinking time, and backtracked furiously. She couldn’t remember what they’d just been talking about. Had he hypnotized her somehow? Was her tea drugged?

No, he was probably just that slick. He’d mentioned snow leeks in one of the meat pies. Asked if she was familiar, _aren’t they native to your House, Harrow?_ That led to questions about the Ninth, and God was so charismatic and approachable, she had answered all of his innocuous bait questions without suspecting any ulterior motive, which eventually led up to a question about her parents. That was the red flag that had jolted Harrow from her stupor, and led to her current awareness that she was sitting across from the most dangerous, powerful being in the galaxy.

“Sorry, dear, you were saying?” God had inclined in his seat, a picture of concern. Harrow recognized her father in this gesture of his, and didn’t let herself unsee it. Unlike her father, he was friendly and a good listener, but exactly like the fetid old corpse, she knew beyond a doubt that he saw Harrow as a resource, not a person. In this case, he was putting her at ease just to trawl information out of her. She pinned that realization to the back of her mind to examine later.

Fuck, this muffin was dry. “Sorry, sir,” Harrow spilled a few crumbs from behind her hand. The muffin was supposed to buy her time, but it was sitting like a hairball in her throat, too tough to swallow. Too much time was passing. The silence, broken only by her mouth noises, was getting awkward. Harrow swigged her tea, which helped a little, and chewed furiously. “Very.. fibrous… muffin,” she choked out.

God smiled, and smoothly took back the conversation. “Ah, the berelnut-bran? Does tend to stick to the roof of one’s mouth, doesn’t it.”

He talked about the rare sight of a berelnut orchard in bloom, their humble history as a Fifth House staple, and the dangerous labor it took to harvest the nuts from their razor-edged shells. He was wrapping up this informative exposition just as Harrow finally managed to squeeze the last of the muffin down her throat.

She sipped her tea, stifled a cough, and got back to business. “Next time I find myself on the Fifth House, I’ll have to do my best to see them. And my parents are aging, but still capable, thank you for asking. Now, Emperor, I have a question if I may.”

“You may.” He sat back in his chair and steepled his fingers.

“What can you tell me about the role that consent plays in a lyctor’s ascension?”

God raised his eyebrows. “Not a simple question, I’m afraid. What prompted it?”

From here on out, Harrow chose her words carefully. “Ianthe the First stabbed her cavalier in the back when she assumed his soul. I watched her then appear to argue with him, at times not seeming in control of her body. Cytheria mentioned that unlike Naberius the Third, her cavalier was willingly sacrificed for her lyctorhood, and it still took centuries for the soul to settle. This makes me wonder how important the cavalier’s will is to their necromancer’s ascension, and in what ways an initial lack of consent will affect the lyctor long-term.”

“Harrowhark the First,” God chuckled. “You are asking questions far beyond your years, and ones better suited for your Teachers. You will meet them tomorrow once Ianthe has recovered, but I suppose I can do my best until then. Remind me the circumstances of your ascension?”

He sounded like Harrow’s father, asking what she’d learned in mass that morning, because he knew she hadn’t been paying attention. _Remind me of the opening passage today, Harrowhark? I seem to have forgotten it._

“Cytheria the First had us cornered, and neither I nor my cavalier would have survived otherwise. My cavalier, she… committed suicide, forcing me to accept her soul. I knew what she was attempting, and knew it was necessary for our survival, so I completed the process, though I did not initiate it.”

“And how do you feel now?” God’s face gave nothing away, and Harrow hoped hers didn’t either.

There it was again, the inexplicable urge to unbutton her tongue and let loose the torrent of conflicting emotions bottled up inside her at this very moment. Harrow looked down at her tea cup to refocus, absently smudging the black lipstick stain on its rim with her thumb.

“I don’t feel like two separate beings inhabiting one body, as I’d expected to. It’s just me.”

“Then I have high hopes for you, Harrowhark.” God beamed across the table at her. “This tells me two things: that you are a very adept necromancer already, and that your cavalier loved you very much.”

Harrow spluttered on the last dregs of her tea. _Loved???_

“Yes, Harrow?”

“Forgive me,” Harrow said, blotting at her mouth with her napkin. “I wasn’t expecting such high praise.”

“Forgiven. Harrow, I expect you’re feeling no small amount of guilt over her death, perhaps even regret. Loss.”

Harrow bit her cheek. “We weren’t close."

“And yet, together, you attained a bond of the highest honor, shared by only about a dozen other beings in all history.”

“I just thought I’d feel… more.”

“Harrow dear, in time you will feel more powerful than you could ever dream. Your current turmoil is nothing more than growing pains, so have patience, and try not to pick at loose threads. You've done well by me, child. Don’t unravel it.”

Harrow sensed their discussion had come to a close. She placed her cup in its saucer and stood. “I thank you for your advice, Kindly Emperor. You have given me much to contemplate.”

The Kindly Emperor rose with a slight bow, which she returned politely. “Of course, dear. I always have time for my lyctors. Did you enjoy your breakfast?”

“Very much, especially the honey citron tarts.”

“A favorite of mine as well,” the Emperor beamed, and they were back in the sheltered shallows of small talk. “I shall send for you when I need you, but in the meantime, my home is your home. Please make yourself comfortable.” He walked her to the door, where two skeletons were waiting to bus their table, and a third was holding a letter for the Emperor. While he was occupied by this new business, Harrow slipped away into the shadows back to her rooms.

* * *

When Harrow was safe from the unnerving presence of God, key in hand, door locked behind her, she took a deep breath, and closed her eyes.

Long after death, bones _resonated_ with echoes of the life their marrow had sustained. This was a simple necromantic fact, something Harrow had been born knowing. Some necromancers, like Palamedes Sextus, could date objects within minutes of their creation or passing by reading these ripples. He had been in the process of teaching Harrow the rudimentary theorems necessary for this skill, and to remember him sent a pang of loss through Harrow's chest. Somehow, she hadn’t stopped to really _listen_ to the echoes of death once since her arrival on the Mithraeum, and could almost hear the Sixth necromancer playfully chiding her lack of precaution.

 _Fuck_ , it was loud in here. Whoever had decorated the apartment had been heavily inspired by Ninth House interiors… from a few myriad ago. This was a period in history when Priests of the Locked Tomb were known for taking long “sabbaticals” to Frontier worlds for trophy hunting. In the front room alone, Harrow heard the overlaying echoes of no less than twenty-four sets of remains. Upon closer investigation, most of those came from a decorative glass case on the mantle which was filled with jewel-winged beetles pinned in shadowboxes, and the perfectly articulated skeletons of exotic vertebrates.

Harrow couldn’t work in these conditions. Next to the taxidermy case, a lovely terracotta bowl held three distal phalanges which were polished to a shine. When she recognized them, Harrow found the nearest purple tassel and yanked.

It was tradition, when gifting or selling constructs, to present their new owners with a small, non-essential bone taken from that construct, to track, identify, and command them by. When Harrow was twelve, she’d started tagging her own constructs by their stirrup bones, and kept a jar of them on her nightstand.

Presently, there was a light clattering at the door. Harrow unlocked it, and let in the three constructs the Emperor had assigned her. Sure enough, all three were missing the smallest bone at the tip of their left pinkie fingers. Undoubtedly, she couldn’t trust these any more than she could trust God, but they would save her the strain of manual labor. 

“Greetings,” she acknowledged her constructs. They were immaculately preserved, masterfully assembled beings, who behaved much like the remarkable constructs at Canaan House. Harrow would no doubt be tasked to investigate and learn from their structure at some point. “Please remove all of the furniture from this room.”

It took only an imperceptible nudge of necromancy on Harrow’s part to set them in motion. Two began lifting and carrying a very heavy looking loveseat towards the door, and a third rushed out ahead to grab a cart for the tchotchkes cluttering every surface. Until the skeletons returned, Harrow played with her ears, finding three approximately-shaped bones she no longer needed or liked the look of and pocketed them, replacing the empty holes with her new constructs' phalanges. Then she ditched her robe in the bedroom, rolled her sleeves up past her elbows, and found a sheer black scarf to hold her hair out of her face with.

As the room was emptied with practiced efficiency, the constructs’ tidying uncovered only a few pieces of furniture worth keeping: an absurdly comfortable high-backed winged armchair, upholstered with blood red corduroy; an accompanying end table with a surprising amount of hidden storage, a large bookcase, a sturdy stepping stool that had been covered in vases of preserved black roses, and a tall, heavy-based lamp with a dark beaded shade that could be angled like a spotlight anywhere in the room. 

Once all the clutter had been carted out, Harrow felt like she could breathe again. No longer was she trapped in a claustrophobic cave like her family’s home in Drearburh, and it was blessedly _quiet_.

Except for a distant whine, like a blood-sucking insect drifting somewhere in the room, just barely out of hearing range. This was the final resonance Harrow had sensed. It was so faint it may well not exist.

As someone who regularly spied on and meddled with people using tiny pieces of oss hidden in their rooms, Harrow knew she absolutely had to find it, no matter how small. Only then would she be able to set up her own bone wards and feel safe in the privacy of her new home.

The constructs returned, and she sent them off with the order that once they fetched her a basic toolbox, they were dismissed. Harrow did a quick sweep of her rooms, which were much more to her taste now without the excess decorum. She didn’t sense any unaccounted for remains anywhere else, and began patiently closing in on the source of the whining, isolating it to one corner of the front room near the ceiling.

Harrow dragged over the stepping stool and began feeling around. Her hands hovered over the wall, reaching out to the faint quiver of bone, willing it towards herself.

When her hand passed over it, a nail buried deep in the crown molding twitched slightly. Harrow tried to dig it out with her fingernails, broke two, then remembered she’d sent for a hammer. For some reason, she couldn’t simply use necromancy to remove the nail and examine it like she had the perpetual bone jamming the lock in Canaan House.

Harrow paced until the skeletons brought her tools, and attacked the nail the second the door locked behind her. After much scuffing and scratching of the ceiling, Harrow stood holding the meddlesome object, which looked, for all intents and purposes, like an ordinary, solidly metal nail.

But Harrow could _feel_ the organic nature of it, that imperceptible whine of bone now a buzzing hum in her palm. If there was anything osseous about the nail, she couldn’t manipulate it, which vexed her and set her on edge. She had to break it open somehow and get to the bottom of this.

The hammer, no matter how hard she hit it, couldn’t dent the thing. Nails weren’t typically made of metal this tough, no matter how rich the household, but this one had been heavily enchanted. After some thought, Harrow set the nail on the end table and grabbed Gideon’s longsword, which had been brought in with her other belongings while she was in the hospital wing. Perhaps it was the lack of adrenaline and immediate threat of death, but Harrow had a much harder time handling the sword now than when she’d used it to kill Cytheria the First. She had to all but drag it across the floor, and it clattered loudly out of its scabbard when the point got stuck inside. With a deep breath and a count to three, Harrow rolled her shoulders and hefted the sword overhead.

Oh, fuck, it was heavy. Harrow aimed it at the nail and didn’t so much swing down to strike it, as she held the sword above the table and relaxed her arms, letting it drop.

It split the nail in two, the pieces scattering across the bare floor with a _ping_ , and Gideon’s sword stuck itself solidly in the wood of the table. Harrow took the pommel in both hands and lifted with her back, shimmying it back and forth until it sprung free and slid to the ground. There was now a deep, jagged gash in the top of the table, and a nail-sized chip in the sword’s perfectly honed and oiled blade.

“Shit, Nav is gonna kill me…” Harrow breathed. It wasn’t till after she’d collected the nail pieces that she realized what she’d said. She spared a guilty glance at the sword, then turned her attention to the nail. Sure enough, its core was hollow, and filled with the barest splinter of human bone. Harrow drew it out with ease and turned it over in her palm, letting the now useless pieces of metal fall to the floor.

Such a brilliant little piece of work. Harrow couldn’t date it precisely as Palamedes could have, but she knew it had been disguised so well that it had gone undisturbed for a very, very long time. Unlike the neatly organized cabinets of bones in her study, raw materials with insignificant resonances, this little sliver was layered with powerful, ancient necromancy. She wondered what it was for, whether it was a tiny spy tool, or simply part of the ship’s own defenses.

No, there would be evenly spaced bone-nails throughout the ship if that were the case. Harrow wondered how many other private rooms were bugged on the Mithraeum. Once she’d thoroughly examined it, she ground it to dust between her fingertips, like squashing a cockroach.

A moment later, a clatter at the door made Harrow jump. It was a distinct bone-on-wood sound, but unlike the constructs shuffling and bumping, this knocking was a precise _ratatatat_. Harrow was frantically trying to decide how she’d explain the state of the room to whoever was on the other side of the door, praying it wasn't the Emperor here to ask why she was meddling.

It was Ianthe Tridentarius.

Harrowhark stood in the doorway with her arms crossed, blocking the view of the room behind her. Her dark clothes were sweaty and streaked with bone dust, and her short-cropped hair was trying to escape in a hundred directions from its bandanna. “Can I help you, Third?”

Ianthe stood her ground, blinked disconcertingly blue eyes at her. “It’s First now, Nonagesimus.” She looked sallow and insubstantial, like she was still recovering from her battle with Cytheria.

“Can I help you, First?” Harrow repeated, not budging an inch.

“Oh, I just wanted to say hello. My rooms are down the hall.”

Harrow waited silently for Ianthe to clarify the point of this interaction. They hadn’t exactly been on the best of terms the last time they spoke, and Ianthe was sorely mistaken if she thought they could be friendly enough for her to allow Ianthe into her rooms.

“Your hair looks good like that,” Ianthe said after a while, giving Harrow a thin smile which she thought was supposed to look friendly, but came across as more ‘predatory eel’. Harrow hadn't washed her hair in weeks, and it had dried badly after her bath this morning, so she knew Ianthe was trying to butter her up for something.

Harrow was terrible with compliments, both giving and receiving. She looked Ianthe over, but she just looked like the same sickly pale wraith she'd always been. Objectively, she her features were delicate, sharp, and lovely, but it was spoiled on Harrow, as would the beauty of a praying mantis she'd just witnessed digesting its mate. Ianthe's flowing, diaphanous robes had been replaced with a flowing, diaphanous blouse with trailing, sheer sleeves. One of these masked a prosthetic of gilded bone affixed where Ianthe’s right arm had previously been. Overcome with momentary curiosity, Harrow stepped a little further out of the doorway to get a closer look.

“New arm,” Harrow pointed out, by way of returning Ianthe’s compliment.

She looked crestfallen and self-conscious all of a sudden, a deflated peacock, and started rubbing at her bicep where the flesh ended. For Harrow's benefit, she extended the arm into the light and flexed all of its joints in a smooth motion. “It's supposedly state of the art," she boasted, but didn't seem too enthusiastic about it. Upon closer investigation, the gold humerus didn’t just attach to Ianthe’s arm, it went _into_ her arm, likely connecting with her surviving organic bone. The meat of her arm had grown around the intrusion as evenly as it could, marred only by a few thin lines of scar tissue, which looked raw but otherwise healed.

“Hm.” Harrow said.

“I didn’t ask them to put it on, I just woke up with it.” Now Ianthe sounded stressed and defensive.

Harrow imagined it would be quite traumatic to wake from a near-death experience with an entirely new limb, but she didn't feel particularly sympathetic to Ianthe right now. Besides, there was a strong chance she was acting at being distressed to try and garner pity.

“I bet it hurts having your bodily autonomy violated, you must be upset that you didn’t have a say in such a big decision concerning your life.”

Ianthe didn’t pick up on Harrow’s terse tone, or her thinly veiled allusion to the Third's cavalier. She was holding her gold hand to her chest and flexing its fingers in a fidgeting manner. “I do! It isn’t fair. I was actually glad when Cytheria cut that one off first. I’ve always been right-handed, but Babs is a useless lefty, and I thought it was poetic justice that I would have to learn to do everything left-handed after what I did to him.”

A muscle in Harrow’s jaw twitched. Seems Ianthe had miscalculated that just because Harrow was the only other person on the Mithraeum who knew her circumstances first-hand, Harrow would absolve her actions at Canaan House, tell her all was forgiven, and comfort her. Harrow didn't want to make an enemy of the only other lyctor she knew, but there would be no love lost if it came to that. “I see you’ve grown a conscience,” she gritted out. “Unfortunately, I’m busy, and I don’t want to talk about it with you. So if you’ll excuse me--”

Harrowhark shut the door in Ianthe’s face and locked it, which felt very good.

Then she walked across the room and picked up Gideon Nav’s longsword, technically now property of Harrowhark Nonagesimus. That would never feel true, the damn thing was as much an extension of her cavalier as Harrow's bone jewelry was to her own self. Harrow ran her thumb along the new chip in the blade, pressing until it snagged and broke skin.

“I’m sorry, Nav. If there’s an armorer here, I’ll get it repaired.” Much more carefully this time, Harrow slid the blade back into its scabbard and snapped it shut, then propped the sword by the door near her cloak.

By now it was getting late. Harrow sucked at her cut thumb till it stopped bleeding, then set about gathering materials to construct her room's defenses. Her earliest bone wards had been primitive: a clavicle tied to a string from the ceiling so she would hear when anyone opened her bedroom door. Over the years, they had gotten more precise and intricate, as well as more ornamental. They shielded her space from prying senses and alerted her even remotely of comings and goings. To other necromancers, they formed a barrier which was as solid as a tangible wall, and non-necromancers were usually too creeped out by them to consider trespassing. Her wards at Canaan House had been anything but subtle, meant to intimidate the other guests and unmistakably mark her territory: _Ninth House, don't fucking touch_.

But the Mithraeum had inspired her. The ship was a necromancer’s dream in many ways. The very walls themselves seeped with thanergy, and the intricacy and subtlety of it was a marvel. For all the power this vessel contained, each enchantment was layered seamlessly into the decor to create the illusion of a perfectly normal mansion floating in space.

This was how Harrow would construct her lyctor's armor and fortify her inner sanctum: by integrating them so innocuously with her Ninth House aesthetic that her defensiveness hopefully wouldn't arouse suspicion. Harrow began by taking the theorems she normally used to insulate rooms from surveillance, and condensing them into a handful of cremains. This, she shaped into a mirror image of the hollow bone-nail, and drove it with a flick of her wrist into the tiny hole left in the molding overhead.

This was Harrowhark’s favorite type of challenge: a delicate and exacting puzzle that forced her to think creatively and test her skills. Could she make the wards small enough to escape detection, yet powerful enough to counteract whatever unknown forces were at work aboard this vessel? How much precision could she manage to execute, giving her space maximal protection with minimum impact on the architecture?

At some point, she kicked her boots off and began pacing barefoot, toying with bits of bone and twine made from braided sinew, muttering under her breath as she measured the space and noted every loose board and weak patch in the walls. Without its gaudy furnishings, her front room was much bigger than it looked. Chair, lamp, and table went along the wall nearest the fireplace, with the bookshelf and step stool against the opposite wall. This gave Harrow a clear enough space in the middle to use as a workshop for experimenting with smaller constructs and such.

When her warding was finished, the room looked exactly the same as it had before she began, but with the addition of about two dozen bone-nails driven into key points around the apartment in place of a pile of regular nails in the bowl on the mantle. For decorum's sake, Harrow had hung a single skull with sinew twine above her door on the outside, and affixed a simple guard command to it as a red herring.

Normally, after doing this amount of necromancy for this long without a break, Harrow would be dripping with blood-sweat and completely fatigued. But now, she was full of energy and purpose, striding across the room trailing little eddies of osseous matter which floated in her wake. For the simple joy of it, she made murals of canine teeth on the wall and dashed them away to make new ones. She strung a chain for her room key out of regenerating bone as fine and pliable as any silver. She assembled a handful of little constructs out of hand bones which scuttled endearingly between her ankles. Safely locked in her private little sanctuary, Harrowhark tinkered like a child discovering bone magic for the first time. She let herself enjoy a taste of her new power, savoring that which she’d worked towards her whole life, and carefully avoided reminding herself what it had cost.

When she finally put all her toys away and settled into bed for the evening, Harrow's mind was humming with ideas and her body was pleasantly tired, but not overexerted in any way. As soon as the lights were out, she fell into a deep, comfortable sleep.

* * *

_The stone that covers the Locked Tomb is cold under Harrow’s touch, leeching the thalergy from her fingertips as they worm into the seam of rock and tug. She must open the Tomb, can’t rest until she knows what’s inside…_

_A rough hand claps Harrow on the back and startles her. Her wrist is grabbed, and she’s being tugged away from the tomb, back through the bowels of Drearburh._

_Nononono, this isn’t how it goes, take me back, she protests, in the foggy, half-aware way of dreams._

_“Haven’t you had enough of that dead chick, Nonagesimus?” her captor asks._

_Harrow knows this voice, she knows it well. She knows the callused fingers tugging her gently along like she knows the bones hanging in her ears. Maybe just this one night, the Tomb can stay shut._

_Eager to make the most of this change in pace, Harrow opens her mouth to rattle off a snarky comment on Gideon’s own taste in women, but no sound comes out. Experimentally, she screams a silent scream. Okay, the dream won’t let her speak right now. This is an exercise in listening to her dead cavalier, apparently._

_Gideon Nav keeps talking, as if she’s having a two-way conversation with Harrow instead of just dragging her along. They pass the lower-tier cell block where Gideon’s room is and keep going, up and up and up in concentric spirals until the narrow slats in the stone walls begin to filter in sallow grey half light instead of just dust._

_Gideon is telling Harrow something very important, but her voice is distorted. She keeps looking over her shoulder to make sure Harrow is listening, but it’s incomprehensible. Where are they going again? Gideon leads her down a well-worn labyrinth of familiar tunnels until they come to a stop outside Harrowhark’s private quarters, which are set apart from the other featureless grey metal doors in the hallway by the curtains of bone hanging off the frame._

_“You’ll have to deactivate your wards or I can’t get in,” Gideon explains, and lets go of Harrow’s arm._

_The bone wards rattle when they recognize their creator, and are ominously still when Harrow take’s Gideon by the hand and pulls her inside. Her room is the same as she remembers leaving it, her last night in Drearburh before departing for the Emperor’s summons. It’s a cramped, dirty room with too much dusty, rickety furniture cluttering the walls. Her laundry is kicked into piles like ebon snowdrifts in every corner, bed a rumpled mess, and half her drawers are hanging open and overflowing with junk._

_Harrow sits cross-legged on the foot of the bed and watches Gideon begin to rifle through her stuff. Dimly, she realizes that her assumption that Griddle was nosing around in the drawers of her subconscious had been quite literally correct. Harrow finds that she doesn’t mind this like she used to._

_“Why were you always so fascinated by my things?” she asks her cavalier, relieved to learn she can speak in this part of the dream, perhaps an effect of being in her own room. “I got so good at bone wards just to prevent you from breaking in here and snooping.”_

_Griddle is closely examining the shelves across the room where Harrow collects her earliest bone constructs, arranged like some children might arrange a handful of their favorite teddy bears. “That’s exactly why, idiot.” She picks up a rat skull that starts chittering and spinning around in her palm like a wind-up toy. “You had_ so much shit _, and you were always so greedy with it! I just wanted you to share.”_

_“Why should I share? You always smashed my creations when we played together.”_

_“Because all my life, I could fit everything I owned into one duffel bag, and even_ that _you couldn’t leave alone. Anything I had that you wanted became yours sooner or later, and it pissed me off. You had a whole room full of junk you didn’t even use, and you could always make more constructs to hang out with. I just had a plastic bag of magazines hidden in the vent over my bed.” Gideon doesn’t sound angry, just matter-of-fact. She gently places the rat skull back in its ring of dust and turns to face Harrow, leaning her forearms on the footboard of her bed._

_Harrow breaks Gideon’s eye contact and hangs her head. “I’m sorry, Griddle. I was so selfish.”_

_Gideon cracks a toothy smile. “Well, you’re still pretty selfish, Nonagesimus. But it’s kept you alive this long, so I can’t fault you too much for it.”_

_Harrow purses her lips and worries a frayed edge of sheet between her nails. “I wish you’d be properly angry with me, Griddle,” she chides. “You hated me for so long, and I deserved it. I don’t know why you insist on ignoring how horrible I was to you now.”_

_Gideon thinks hard about this while she leafs through one of Harrow’s diaries. “Well,” she begins carefully. “I think it’s because I understand the world a bit better now. People grow up. You were pure evil to me when we were kids, and I went out of my way to antagonize you. But I was just lonely and bored and pissed off, and you were the one person in Drearburh who even tolerated me most of the time. I wanted you to like me, and when that didn’t work, I wanted you to hate me enough to seek me out for a fight every once in a while.”_

_This emotional vulnerability is a new color on Gideon, and Harrow isn’t sure how she feels about it. For all that they’d spent their whole lives together, they’d never really talked about anything that mattered, until it was too late. “I never knew you were such a philosopher, Nav.”_

_“Hey, shut up. I’m having a moment. You’re so stuck in your own head all the time, Harrow. But I’m stuck in here with you now, so I’ve finally got a captive audience.”_

_“Fair enough. Are you going to do this every night, or will I get to sleep normally every once in a while?”_

_“We’ll see. Anyways, I’ve been thinking. Because you never told me jack about your life, I had no idea the kind of pressure you were under back on the Ninth. I think we could’ve gotten along better if you’d trusted me enough to talk about what was going on. I couldn’t have fixed it, too far above my paygrade, but maybe I could’ve helped you pull the femur out of your ass every once in a while.”_

_“That’s sweet of you, but I managed just fine.”_

_“You had a nervous meltdown because of your genocidal, over-controlling parents, broke into literally the one grave you weren’t allowed to, and risked awakening an undead monstrosity that God himself has kept locked up for ten thousand years on a lifeless rock for fear of it ever getting loose. If you’d listened to me, we could’ve just played bone Jenga in your room that afternoon instead.”_

_Harrow scowls and throws a pillow at Gideon’s head. “Don’t bother trying to guilt me for what happened. I’ve been doing that to myself since I was ten, so I’m basically immune to anything you can accuse me of.”_

_Gideon ducks the pillow effortlessly, snags it off the ground, and slings it back double-force into Harrow’s stomach. “There you go again, high empress of the impenetrable calcified castle! Pretending you can do everything better on your own. If we’re gonna make this whole lyctor thing work, you’re gonna have to get over your severe allergy to other humans. You’re alive. I gave up a smokin’ hot body to ride around in your scrawny meatsuit, and I’m gonna haunt the_ shit _out of it if you don’t get over yourself and put it to use.”_

_Harrow doesn’t know if she can cry in dreams, but she feels like she might be about to find out. “Griddle… stop.”_

_Gideon is now pawing through the drawers of her nightstand. “Not a chance,” she says._

_“No, I mean. I never asked you to sacrifice yourself. I couldn’t have, after everything you’ve already lost because of me. I could never have asked you to die for me, Griddle. I never wanted you to die, period, and I don’t even know if lyctorhood will be worth it without you there to enjoy it with me. Part of why I want to fix the Ninth House so badly is so you wouldn’t want to leave anymore. I wanted to make it good for you. I don’t know why I’m doing any of this anymore and I don’t want to do it without you, and--”_

_Gideon interrupts Harrow with a raucous laugh. “Ha! Sweet victory!” she crows, and holds the spoils of her snooping up in the air, wrapped protectively in a piece of clean-ish laundry from the floor so she isn’t touching it directly._

_“_ Griddle _, I was saying something_ important! _” Harrowhark snaps, feeling cut off on the brink of emotional catharsis. “And what do you have there?”_

 _Just out of arm’s reach, Gideon is dangling a polished curve of bone over Harrow’s head. “I knew I wasn’t the only horny freak in the Ninth,” she teases. “Oh my god, I can’t believe you have a collection of bone dildos, you_ weirdo _.”_

_Harrow feels herself flushing from tip to toes and covers her face before letting out an agonized howl. “Ugh! Put that away, you disgusting asshole!”_

_“Hey, having a little fun is nothing to be ashamed of.” Gideon is clearly enjoying herself way too much. “But seriously, this is so much more fucked up than a couple pornos. Whose bone was this? Did I know them?”_

_“Griddle!!!” Harrow barks, and begins throwing pillows again, along with anything else in range._

_Gideon is wielding the dildo like a dagger and knocking Harrow’s projectiles aside, but she’s laughing so hard she’s doubled over, and Harrow finally manages to box her ear with a half-full laundry bag. Gideon hops on the bed and dumps the laundry on top of Harrow, who yanks on her knees to send her toppling. Harrow scrambles for the object Gideon is still waving over her head, and for her efforts, ends up in a headlock with her cavalier’s knuckles drumming against her skull._

_Harrow summons her little army of toy constructs to help her wrestle the damn thing away and hide it somewhere Gideon will never_ ever _find it again, but this just makes her cavalier laugh harder. “Ewww, get your creepy bones off me, bitch! I don’t know where they’ve been anymore!!” she squeals, and Harrow regrets becoming immortal because she would love nothing more right now than to drop dead of embarrassment._

_Finally, Harrow gets a grip on Gideon’s wrist and digs her nails into the vein sharply, prompting her to drop the dildo with a yelp of pain. Gideon licks the back of her hand in retaliation and Harrow flings her arm away. “Ugh, Griddle, you’re impossible!!” Harrow snaps, and hurls the accursed thing into a pile of dirty robes across the room before Gideon can grab it again._

_Gideon sits up in the bed, still smiling. “Yeah, I know. But now you’re feeling sorry for yourself for a different, less depressing reason than achieving your lifelong dream, right?”_

_Unfortunately, she's right. “You’re a real pain, Gideon Nav,” Harrow grumbles. Hesitantly, and with jerky, unfamiliar movements, she leans over and squeezes Gideon in a brief, bony hug. “Thank you. For… everything. I owe you an unpayable debt.”_

_“You wanna know how to repay that debt?” Gideon asks, her keen gold eyes fixed earnestly on Harrow. “Just live a little every once in a while, okay? And don’t be a stranger.” Fondly, and with surprising gentleness, Gideon reaches out to tousle Harrow’s hair. Then she flicks the tip of Harrow’s nose, hard, which wakes her up with a jolt._

* * *

Harrow blinked, disoriented, at the ceiling. For a long moment, she laid very still and tried to absorb as many details from the dream as she could before it faded. Frowning, she reached up and touched her cheeks, which were tear-free. When Harrow finally sat up, she half expected to see Gideon sitting at the other end of the bed with that insufferable cheeky grin on her face, and was disappointingly alone. She ran a hand through her hair where Gideon’s fingers had brushed in the dream, but once more, it was just her own knobby knuckles and jagged, bitten nails on her scalp.

Belatedly, Harrow noticed that she'd woken upside down in the bed, and that she was sitting on a bare mattress, with her bedding strewn haphazardly around the room. “Oh, Griddle,” she sighed, and rose to begin another day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kudos/comments/corrections/etc are welcome! :)


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW for Ch. 3: disordered eating, body image/dysphoria, canon-typical gore, Ianthe says an ableist slur. Harrow has a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

* * *

“ _when I imagine myself_  
_I am always leaving_  
_I couldn’t draw my own face if God asked_ ”

— Andrés Cerpa, “The Vault”

* * *

“Are you joking?” Ianthe asked, stifling a surprised chuckle.

Their teacher slid another, presumably identical, test across the table to Harrowhark, face down. Every single piece of writing that she’d seen on the Mithraeum so far was on _real wood paper_ , not flimsy, and this was no exception. She ran her thumb under a corner just to feel its rich grain.

“No.” Teacher responded, leveling a weary glare at Ianthe. They were lean and angular, with thin, severe-looking spectacles and a thin, severe-looking moustache that curled downward in an appearance of constant contempt. “This test is designed to measure your aptitude for and competency in the necromantic arts, and will consist of three sections, each timed ninety minutes.”

Ianthe leaned towards Harrow, looking incredulous. “Can you believe they’re making us take a NAP test?”

“A what?”

Ianthe made a shocked ‘o’ with her mouth. “Necromantic Aptitude and Placement test? It’s standardized across the galaxy, every necromancer in the Cohort has to pass one when they enlist? I’ve been taking NAPS-- Necromantic Aptitude Placement Sets, since I was a child.”

Harrowhark Nonagesimus had never taken a standardized test in her life.

“--Once finished with the written portion of the exam, you will proceed to the practical course, where you will be presented with a randomized scenario designed to measure your skill for manipulating thanergy. The final course will be a comprehensive physical exam.”

Teacher set two sleek pens in front of the lyctors. Ianthe was warming up her writing hand, wearing a blank, focused expression, like she was dragging old study guides from her subconscious for a last minute review.

Harrow was trying not to panic.

There was a large hourglass set between them on the table, which Teacher flipped over. Then they settled back in their seat across the table, smoothed their stiff skirts with a _snap_ , and cracked open a book.

Harrow was by no means poorly-educated. She had been literate since she was four, and had read her way through the Ninth House's library by eight. By eleven, she was almost single-handedly running her House. She was smart, and knew or could deduce a lot about most things by what she’d learned from being raised by books. But she had never had a teacher, not in any meaningful way. Most of what her parents had taught her growing up had to do with practical things, like how to balance a ledger, how to maintain enough bone constructs to keep her dying House on life support, and what ratio of soil to offal made the best snow leek fertilizer, with a capstone on How To Inherit A Cult.

Meanwhile, Princess Ianthe Tridentarius had likely been groomed for academic excellence by an army of the Third House’s finest tutors. She was currently writing furiously, already onto her third page.

Harrow hadn’t even flipped her NAP over. She did, and looked it over with shaking hands. Eight pages: four multiple choice, one short answer, three essay. These were undoubtedly very common test categories, but to Harrow, they looked utterly alien.

Multiple choice frustrated her to no end, because every question and all its answers felt false and reductive, lacking nuance and perspective. She filled in the short answer section first, answering the prompts as if she were explaining the very simple theorems they concerned to a child, or Griddle. This gave her the confidence boost to finish multiple choice. She looked up to check her time, only to watch the last few grains in the hourglass skitter down its sides.

Ianthe pushed out her chair with a self-satisfied huff and leaned back. It looked as though she’d asked for two extra pages to finish her essay. Harrow had left the entire section blank.

Teacher pursed their lips when Harrow returned her test, and made a point of tapping the disordered sheets on the table to straighten them. Ianthe returned her test with her pen cap clipping the pages together in a clean line.

Harrowhark knew a catastrophic failure when she saw one.

* * *

Thoroughly chastened, Harrow used the walk from the third floor conference room to the first floor laboratory where the practical would be held, to think about her situation.

These tests were not about proving her worth as a lyctor, not really. They were the same sanitized tests every Cohort recruit had to sweat through, and they only measured a shallow, though broad, range of theorems. So what was the Emperor hoping to learn from their results?

It wasn’t capability or book knowledge, both she and Ianthe had already earned their seat at the table by surpassing Canaan House’s challenges. So it had to be something along the lines of: _How many hoops will you jump through before you snap?_

God was putting them through their paces to determine how they’d be the most useful to him. And also to introduce his new pets to their teachers, so the three of them could get a sense for what their new students were lacking in.

While they walked, Ianthe was talking at her about her essay. Harrow went on ignoring her.

The NAP was an important first impression, but what impression did Harrow want that to be? She’d have to see the practical course to decide.

The lab, when they reached it, had been cleared of furniture and divided with yellow tape on the floor: two long columns, each sectioned into eight boxes.

It was Harrow’s turn to laugh. _Hopscotch_ , she thought, and smiled to herself. Each square represented one house’s style of necromancy, she just had to make it to the other side and hit the right squares on the way.

Their teacher’s introduction explained as much. There was a bone construct wearing a ring in each column, and the young lyctors were to fetch the ring from their respective constructs without touching, dismantling, or damaging it. Leaving the exam’s boundaries was an automatic failure. Each square contained a necromantic reagent, and these were the only materials they could use to retrieve the ring. At a glance, Harrow spotted a tub of human fingers on ice, pen and paper, a small urn of cremains, and a shaving mirror. She stepped up to the starting line.

Across the lab, Ianthe did the same, and flashed Harrow a hand gesture that, depending which House you were in, either meant _Good luck!_ or _Get fucked!_

Harrow returned the gesture, and Teacher flipped another large hourglass.

Once they stepped inside the tape line, their constructs came to life and rattled towards them with surprising speed. Out of the corner of her eye, Harrow saw Ianthe dive for her tub of thumbs and roll under a table with it, already stripping the flesh off one with her bicuspids. Did she still need a boost of thanergy for this simple task, or was it an old habit taking over?

 _Watch your own back,_ Harrow thought, except she thought it in a voice not her own. Reflexively, she ducked and pivoted with a surefootedness she’d never possessed herself, just in time as her loose-limbed construct clattered past her.

Harrow grabbed the cremains and dumped the urn over the construct’s head. At her command, the powdery ash congealed into a sooty paste and flowed into the construct’s joints before solidifying into bone. It creaked to a halt, frozen in place, but remained intact, undamaged, and untouched.

Harrow disliked flesh magic, but it seemed the most effective tool for the job that wasn’t bones. Bones would always be the best choice in her mind for most situations, but today was about showcasing range. With a few fingers from her own tub, Harrow formed two pulsing gloves, which she slipped over her own black silk pair like a second, writhing skin.

Using these, she gently grasped the construct’s hand and pulled the ring off, then dismissed the cremains in a puff of grey. Overhead, a buzzer sounded, and the teacher called her time: one minute, two seconds.

Harrow set the finger-gloves aside to watch Ianthe finish her test.

She had used a rapier angled just so to hobble her construct through its ribcage and pin it to a table, but now she had to remove the ring from its grasping, scrabbling hand. She seemed to mull over a few options before settling on a sack of bones at the end of the row.

With a lack of finesse that offended Harrow, Ianthe built a small construct: two mandibles supported by a single foot. It chittered its way clumsily over to the skeleton and hopped around snapping its teeth at the construct’s hand. Eventually, it latched onto the ring and wriggled it free, then returned with it to Ianthe like a puppy with a ball. When Ianthe put it on, her buzzer rang. Time called: five minutes, thirty seven seconds.

The hourglass was still full, which left Harrow and Ianthe with over an hour to burn before their physical exam.

With purpose, Ianthe strode over to intercept Harrow. “I’m going to find a snack, will you join me?” she asked sweetly. Ianthe seemed much perkier and more sociable since leaving Canaan House, like she was trying to make up for her sister’s bubbly personality in her absence. It was downright creepy. Her smile didn’t fit her face, and she possessed none of Coronabeth’s natural charisma and shine.

“Not hungry,” Harrow replied. Physical activity didn’t agree with her constitution at the best of times, but she was pretty sure if she ate right now, she’d throw up all over their third teacher.

Ianthe peered into her face, brow furrowed slightly. “Really?” she insisted. “You look a bit pale under all that paint. How about I just grab you something from the kitchen for later.”

Harrow did not want something from the kitchen for later, but Ianthe had already departed, giving Harrow’s arm a little squeeze on her way past. Harrow felt as though someone had just walked over her grave.

With Ianthe gone, she decided to use her break to get to know her teacher a bit better. The strict academic who’d given them the written exam had left no room for conversation, but the burly, one-eyed man currently packing up and resetting the lab looked worth a shot.

“Can I offer you a hand?” Harrow asked, bending down to hand him the urn she’d tossed aside earlier.

“Nope,” he said, and walked right past her without taking it.

Harrow, only slightly daunted, set it down on the nearest table and followed at a respectful distance. “Then I was hoping I could ask you some questions while you work, if it’s no trouble.”

The man turned, drew himself up to his full height (a few heads taller than Harrow), and scowled. “It is trouble.”

Harrow stuck out her chin to look him in the eye, which was a brilliant glassy green. “Pardon my rudeness, then. I was simply hoping to get to know my venerable predecessors, who I will be spending a lot of time with for the foreseeable future.”

Teacher leaned down to closely examine her face, straightening after a moment with a look of disdain. “No thanks. I’ve lived ten thousand years, and with my luck, I’ll be stuck on babysitting duty for another ten thousand. Don’t worry, bone nun, we’ll have plenty of time to _get to know each other_ ,” he sneered.

So far, none of the other lyctors had tried to murder her, but they all seemed just as bitter and jaded as Cytheria the First had been. Not much friendlier, either.

Since no social niceties had been extended to her, Harrow saw no need to reciprocate manners, and left without another word.

* * *

The gymnasium was on the same floor as her quarters, so Harrow made a slight detour to change. In her wardrobe, she found a set of plain black clothes in a stretchy, breathable athletic fabric, and threw them on the bed. Reluctantly, she stripped out of her ribcage, and hung the majority of her bone jewelry in the bathroom. She felt naked and vulnerable without her exoskeleton, but didn’t want to risk it catching on anything and strangling her. The bones in her ears, and the prayer knuckles wrapped around her wrist were all she kept.

In the bathroom mirror, she tried to give herself a pep talk. “This is going to be brutal. You are not a healthy person, and that will be abundantly clear to the miserable asshole who’s likely going to be testing you. You need to be prepared to fail two of the three chances you’ve been given to prove yourself today, but this is rock bottom. If you keep clawing, Harrowhark, you’ll eventually see sunlight.”

 _Well that was inspiring,_ said a voice in the back of her head, only it wasn’t the vindictive wheedling of her own self-deprecation. This was the same nebulous presence that had told her to watch her back in the practical exam

“...Nav?” Harrow breathed, not daring to speak any louder lest she scare off the quiet voice.

 _My sword’s in the next room,_ the voice said, welling up from her subconscious and spreading with liquid warmth through her chest. _If you’re that resigned to failure on day one, it might be easier just to fall on it, unless that’s also too much work for your twiggy little limbs._

Harrow scowled at her reflection. It was still just her own painted face, but in this moment, she didn’t feel entirely alone in the cramped bathroom. “Oh, stuff it, Griddle. I’m just being pragmatic.”

 _Yeah, you’re right. If you do this alone, you’ll probably end up with your lungs coming out your nose_.

Harrow raked her hands through her short cropped hair with a frustrated sigh. It was getting too long, which only added to her irritability. The fact that she was hearing voices didn’t help either. This was going to end badly.

_Lucky for you, my waifish master of marrow, you aren’t alone._

Except she was. Gideon was obnoxiously fit, and a master swordswoman, but Gideon wasn’t around to do any of the heavy lifting for her anymore. All Harrow had was her own atrophied meat and a galaxy of necromantic prowess to protect it. She could barely even _lift_ her cavalier’s longsword, and doubted whatever curmudgeon would be administering the test would let her rely on her skeleton army to run laps for her.

She bit her cheek and tried to swallow all the nasty, self-abasing emotions that threatened to gnaw away at the little bubble of warmth Gideon’s voice had left.

“Well, Griddle, you’re dead,” Harrow snapped. “So unless I can find your damned corpse in the next ten minutes and beguile it to run an obstacle course for me, I’m fucked.”

The little voice was silent. Chill dread trickled down Harrow’s spine to replace any relief she’d felt at finally communicating with her cavalier’s soul while awake. Like a woman on her way to the gallows, she strapped the longsword around her waist and strode with grim purpose towards the gymnasium.

Their teacher was a short, stocky woman with a mess of wild hair. She held up a hand and stopped Harrow at the door. “No live weapons today, just practice swords,” she said, gesturing to the weight at Harrow’s hip. Gideon’s waist was apparently fuller than Harrow’s, and the scabbard kept slipping around on her bony pelvis.

Teacher jerked her head across the room to an empty peg in the armory where she could hang it. On the training mats, Ianthe was already warming up. She’d also changed into athletic gear in a soft shimmery gold color, and looked bright and alert. They had similar body types, and Harrow never would have taken Ianthe for an athlete, but as the other woman folded herself in half to touch her toes, Harrow couldn’t help but notice that she seemed very comfortable in her body, lean and elastic as a whip.

 _Dammit_ , Harrow thought to herself. One of her only comforts on her walk to the gym had been that if she was going to fail miserably, at least Ianthe would probably be joining her. This no longer seemed the case.

Harrow strode over to the mats and began stretching, trying to subtly mimic Ianthe’s movements so it looked like she knew what she was doing. When she tried to touch her toes, her knees cracked audibly, and she was only able to strain to put her palms flat on her shins.

Teacher blew a whistle, and once she had both girls’ attention, explained the parameters of the physical. “We’ll start by taking your vitals, followed by weights, a mile run, obstacle course, and a ten-point sparring match. We will conclude the test with a one-on-one health history evaluation.”

Ianthe was nodding along, and knew exactly what to do when she was handed a device to measure her vitals. Harrow had to be shown where to place the adhesive sensors and how to calibrate and secure the little box around her arm.

To Harrow’s relief, she wasn’t the only one who couldn’t handle weight training. Teacher set them each up on a bench and loaded one of the slimmest metal disks onto each end of the bar. Harrow spent the duration struggling to lift the bar out of its cradle, her palms dripping metallic sweat into her eyes. Ianthe managed to lift the bar and press it to her chest, but lost her grip on it struggling to place it back on its hooks and sent the whole thing clattering to the floor.

Teacher’s face was carefully empty as she helped Ianthe pick up her bar.

Harrow had never run a mile in her life, though she’d gotten plenty of _walking_ practice in while pacing Drearburh’s endless winding catacombs. Sometimes, she watched Gideon run laps around the leek fields when she thought Harrow was in chapel, but that hardly translated in any useful way once she set foot on the track.

It ran the perimeter of the gym, and apparently nine laps equaled a mile. At another burst from the whistle, Ianthe was off like a shot, with Harrow not too far behind. Her long legs were serving her well, and she’d managed three laps before she started to fade. Ianthe had already lapped her twice, prancing by with all the grace and exuberance of a gazelle. Harrow’s legs felt fine, but her lungs burned with every breath. They may as well have been replaced with bags of shattered glass, Harrow thought.

She wheezed along, undaunted, though her stilted sprint had slowed to a lopsided jog, and then to a limping walk when her side started cramping. It occurred to Harrow that she hadn’t eaten anything since yesterday’s breakfast, and that this may be having consequences on her blood sugar at the moment. The room was spinning, her vision pulsing in time with her heart, which was doing its admirable best to keep up.

It was unfathomable to Harrowhark that anyone could ever find exercise even remotely enjoyable. This was obviously an elaborate form of torture. Treating it as such, she locked the pain in a dark corner of her mind and kept moving, one foot in front of the other.

Dimly, Harrow heard a whistle as Ianthe finished her mile, but anything that came after that was drowned out in the rhythmic thud of her feet on the track’s textured surface. It had to end eventually, right? Harrow wasn’t even sure if she was still walking, or if she’d keeled over dead a few laps ago and her ghost was just pacing the track until the last of her consciousness faded.

The whistle blew again, and Harrow’s knees buckled with relief. Sweat and greasy paint stung her eyes no matter how much she mopped her forehead with her sleeve, but slowly, the room was righting itself and the roaring in her ears dulled to a throbbing headache. She gulped in deep lungfuls of air and watched Ianthe rummage around in a monogrammed gym bag a little ways off.

Ianthe jogged over to Harrow (how was she still on her feet??) and offered her a bottle of water with her golden hand. Too exhausted to refuse the gesture, Harrow tossed the cap aside and drank deeply before dumping the rest of the bottle over her head. When she opened her eyes again, Ianthe was kneeling beside her and holding out a protein bar.

“I know we’re immortal now,” she said gently, “but I think we still need to eat.”

Her smugness infuriated Harrow, who snatched the bar and ripped off its foil wrapping with her teeth.

Teacher clapped her hands to get their attention. “You’re not done yet, necros!” she announced, sounding like she was enjoying herself thoroughly. “Obstacle course, c’mon. Tridentarius, you’re first, let’s give Nonagesimus a minute to recover.”

Harrow resented being singled out this way, but with a mouth full of tasteless nutrient pulp, she couldn’t protest very easily. It took a great deal of willpower, but she pushed herself to her feet and did her best to stretch before her screaming muscles could cramp up.

It was a hidden blessing to watch Ianthe run the course first, so Harrow could plan her own route with more information. It began with a colorful rock wall, which led to a rope net that had to be traversed in order to reach a set of metal bars. There was a platform that had to be rappelled down using a braided rope, a narrow, winding tunnel to crawl, a field of densely crowded posts to weave through, and another thick rope that had to be scaled. The course’s final platform was a short leap away from a swinging bar, which would deposit the course-runner on a platform, which they could either end the course on, or double back for another lap from.

Much to Harrow’s pleasure, Ianthe seemed to struggle with the obstacle course almost as much as she had the weights. Slowly, she picked her ungainly way through the course, looking as though she’d spent all her energy on the run. It took her several agonizing minutes to claw her way up the braided rope, and she stumbled on the final platform before catching herself and turning the falter into a showy bow to their teacher, who just nodded and scratched a few notes on her clipboard.

When it was Harrow’s turn, she approached the course with mind blank and fists clenched so her hands wouldn’t shake. The tiny voice in her subconscious tried to stir, but Harrow grit her teeth and squashed it down. No distractions.

She climbed the rock wall, which left her fingers raw and aching. She crossed the net bridge like a spider, balancing her weight on the knots so it wouldn’t wobble so much beneath her. So far, not so bad. Somehow, she managed the metal bars without her sweaty palms betraying her, and proceeded to burn them bloody skidding down the rope. The tunnel and agility posts posed no problem, as they were much akin to squirming through the Ninth House’s collapsing crypts. Now that her hands were already scraped raw and her muscles screaming with adrenaline, it wasn’t as difficult as she thought for Harrow to push her limits to haul herself up the rope onto the last platform.

It was higher than it looked from the ground. The last bar swung slightly, just out of reach. Harrow would have to jump for it. She took a deep breath, backed up to give herself a few pace’s head start, and leapt.

When she launched off the platform, her ankle rolled, and she missed a vital boost towards the bar. She wasn’t going to reach it. In a moment of blind panic, Harrow scrabbled for a splinter of bone in her ear and threw it at the bar. It exploded into a fully formed arm that grasped the bar before sprouting another hand to catch her by the wrist.

“No necromancy!” Teacher bellowed, but it wouldn’t have made a difference, because the skeletal wrist snapped, and Harrow dropped like a stone.

To her credit, she didn’t scream when her leg crumpled beneath her with a sickening _crunch_ , but she did lose consciousness for a second. When she came to, alarm bells in her mind were ringing at fever pitch, and Teacher was standing over her with her arms crossed. Ianthe, a short ways away, had her hand over her mouth in shock.

“I said, are you able to finish the course?” Teacher asked, her voice fading in as if through deep water. She didn’t look angry, just stern.

Harrow rolled onto her side and looked down at her mangled leg. She could feel every single shard of bone twisting into her meat, and was keenly aware of all the little joints in her foot that weren’t where they were supposed to be.

“I… have to… necromancy… first....” Harrow slurred, and shoved herself up into a sitting position, back against the wall. She gripped her knee with both hands, sucked in a deep breath, and yanked, like she were shaking out a wrinkled piece of clothing. At her command, her bones knit themselves back together while she bit her cheek bloody to stay focused.

It was easy, she’d reset bones thousands of times, but her head was swimming with exertion, and she was worried she’d heal something crooked. But eventually, trembling like a newborn colt, she pushed herself up off her hands and knees. Then, it was only a matter of staggering a few paces over to the podium and dragging her wrung out body onto it.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Teacher said under her breath. She blew her whistle and read off Harrow’s time. Ianthe, who had finished in half that time, clapped for her. Harrow wanted to die. She closed her eyes and lay back on the podium.

Teacher punched Harrow’s less-broken knee to get her attention. “Can’t say much about your course time, but I do admire your grit, Nonagesimus. Unfortunately, we’ve still got a sparring match to contend with. Can you get it done?”

Harrow nodded, suppressing a whimper. It seemed impossible that this day could keelhaul her any further, but miracle of miracles, it just kept going. _Give yourself to the count of ten,_ Harrow coached herself, taking slow, shallow breaths.

At _ten_ , the Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House pushed herself slowly to her feet and began the long hobble over to the sparring mats. Ianthe fetched two wooden dummy swords from the rack on the far wall, and handed one to her hilt-first. To Harrow’s relief, it was much, much lighter than Gideon’s longsword.

Teacher explained the rules, using terminology Harrow was unfamiliar with. She wished now that she’d paid more attention when Gideon had been complaining about stupid fencing etiquette.

“Are you sure this is okay?” Ianthe asked in a low voice that sounded more simpering than sympathetic. “I feel like I’m about to beat up a cripple.”

Harrow readied her stance, which she knew was off balance. Ianthe tucked one hand behind her back and effortlessly dropped her shoulders into a perfect line. This wasn’t the wraith-like shadow of a girl from Canaan House, this posture and confidence belonged wholly to Naberius Tern. Ianthe’s eyes flashed a wicked blue.

Harrow would kill right now for Gideon’s strength and experience with a blade. She tried to tap into that well of light deep within her soul, willing her cavalier’s voice into being. Nothing. Fucking _nothing_ but her own useless muscles trembling with exertion, her own empty heart thudding itself raw against her ribs.

“I don’t need your _fucking_ pity,” Harrow snarled, baring her teeth. The whistle blow was still hanging in the air when she lunged forward, knocking Ianthe’s guard off center before she could get a chance to parry.

With an aggressive offense and the advantage of being unpredictable due to ignorance, Harrow managed to land two clean hits on Ianthe before taking one herself. By now, Ianthe had gotten her feet under her, and seemed to be striking a balance between Naberius Tern’s muscle memory and her own physical ability. In quick succession, Ianthe landed three hits on Harrow’s torso, and left Harrow just enough of a window to tag her a third time.

But her initial outburst had left her winded, and though she had healed herself, her leg still had the watery, porous feeling of new bone, and wasn’t holding her weight very well. Ianthe was quick to spot this weakness and exploit it mercilessly, striking at her weak flank and pinning Harrow along the edge of the mat.

Before it had scarcely begun, Ianthe had tagged her opponent multiple times, disarmed her, and swept her feet from under her. Smug as could be, Ianthe stood over Harrow with the point of her sword at her sternum. Teacher called the match: ten-three.

Harrow thought all her remaining strength had been consumed in the sparring match, and she would be stuck on her back until the sweat cooled on her body and the lights went out. And yet, from somewhere deep in her gut, she managed to scrape together the energy to peel herself off the mat and shake Ianthe’s offered hand.

Numb and mechanical, she fumbled her way through the remainder of her physical, a private interview with Teacher. _Did you suffer any chronic illnesses or disabilities before your ascension to lyctorhood?_ No. _Is there a history of illness, mental or physical, in your family?_ Mental. _Can you explain?_ You’ve probably heard the rumors about the Ninth, we’re all half-mad. _Are you half-mad?_ As much as any Niner. _How does this condition affect your day-to-day life?_ It doesn’t. _Do you exercise regularly?_ No. _Do you eat a healthy diet?_ ...No. _Why not?_ Not hungry. _You need to eat to keep your health up._ I know. _Please do so._ I will. _And I expect to see you visiting the gymnasium more regularly going forward._ You will.

Harrow kept her head down while she crossed the gymnasium to retrieve her longsword, but Ianthe called out to her on her way to her own interview.

“You know, that wasn’t bad, considering!” she said cheerfully. “Was that Gideon fighting? From the way Babs talked about her, I’d expected a more--”

“Ianthe.” Harrow cut her off, her tone dangerous. “Don’t speak to me about my cavalier.”

“Sorry, I was just--”

“Tridentarius!” Teacher called. “Let’s wrap this up!”

Seeing her way out, Harrow fled the gym as quickly as her bruised body could manage.

* * *

There was nothing that Harrowhark could pinpoint about the Mithraeum as abjectly dangerous, but it felt profoundly _unsafe_. She hadn’t even really been aware of the day’s steady undercurrent of anxiety until she’d come home to find her chambers quiet, dark, and undisturbed. The lock clicked shut behind her and something in her skull depressurized with it.

Since Second Bell, Harrow had been pinned under a microscope, prodded like a rat through a maze. This was the first time all day that she’d felt unobserved. 

_I’m not gonna say ‘I told you so,’ Harrow, but you really could’ve used my help back there._

Harrow was too tired to worry about the finer points of hearing voices. If she was slowly losing her mind, at least she could now do so in peace. She sighed, propped the longsword up by the door, kicked her shoes off, and shuffled over to the fireplace. When she woke up, she’d asked her constructs to stack some fuel for her, and was grateful now.

It was actual real wood, clean cut and fine-grained. Harrow felt a little guilty about just burning it, but the room was cold. She knelt down by the grate to build the fire. “So… Griddle. What are you? How are you talking to me?”

Harrow somehow sensed the voice was hesitant to answer, maybe shy? It was quiet, but Harrow still felt a faint prickle like sunshine at the back of her neck.

“Oh, out with it, for fuck’s sake. You’ve never spared me your opinion before, Nav. Why start now?”

_I don’t know._

It took a little trial and error, but Harrow eventually got a passable fire going in the stone hearth. She stood up with a grunt and made her way into the bedroom, shedding her sports bra as she went. It felt good to stretch her shoulders and breathe deep.

“Wait, can you see me right now?”

 _Can_ you _see you?_

“No.”

_Then neither can I. Go look in the mirror, I wanna see if we have any cool bruises._

“Why should I reward you for being cryptic and avoiding my questions?”

_It was only the one question, my deadly duchess of drama. Because I don’t know._

“Make an educated guess.”

Silence for a long moment, while Harrow looked out the porthole. The Mithraeum seemed to be orbiting low over another planet, a curved whorl of green and blue that took up most of the view.

_Well, I don’t think I’m a ghost. I don’t feel like any less of myself. I guess I don’t know if I’m even dead or not, because I can’t move on, but I’m not attached to the world anymore, just to you. Honestly, it kinda feels like I’m doing every experiment in the Facility at once, forever._

“So you’re in massive amounts of agony?” Harrow felt sick, remembering how ghastly pale and fragile Gideon had been after they passed the entropy field challenge.

_Nope, cause I don’t have a body to feel pain anymore. Yours is the only one I’ve got. It’s like a bony obelisk in a desert and the further I wander from it, there’s just nothing beyond that. Absolutely nothing._

After a few minutes, the rooms began to heat, but it wasn’t with the tarry, crematorium-and-manure stench of fuel logs that Harrow was used to. Turned out burning wood had a sharp, resinous smell that was quite pleasant. It seemed to be burning much slower and producing less smoke than fuel logs as well, which was nice.

“Do you have any idea how creepy that sounds, Griddle?”

_You asked, and it’s your creepy mindscape or whatever that’s my only inspiration now._

“I’m going to take a shower. If you promise to leave me alone, I’ll look in the mirror for you when I’m done.”

_Woah, there. You can tell me to fuck off without implying I’m a pervert. Rude._

“Griddle. You’re horny, but not a pervert. I trust you not to peek. I just want to feel like I’m by myself for a few minutes. Then we can talk.”

Silence. Harrow cranked the tap as hot as it allowed, like she could boil the day away. Her face was undoubtedly a smeared mess, but she didn’t need Gideon to see _exactly_ how much of a mess she was. Paint flowed grey down the drain, sluicing across her eyes. The shower head, as Harrow discovered, had a ‘jet’ setting. She almost cried with relief while it pounded the knots out of her back. 

Warm and dry, Harrow put on a set of flowing long-sleeved pajamas, black. She nearly felt like herself now. A tired, aching self, but all told, she hadn’t vomited blood even once today. Her body also seemed to be healing remarkably fast, and without any effort on her part.

“Okay, Griddle, here you go,” Harrow said, and turned to face the mirror.

The person looking back at her wore a hunted, skittish expression, like one of the emaciated rats that nested in the Ninth House’s storerooms.

 _Harrowhark Nonagesimus, you look like_ ass _. When was the last time you ate??_ Gideon demanded.

Harrow chose not to answer. 

_So, too long. Get one of your skeletons to bring you some porridge._

“It can wait. I’m not--”

_Porridge, bitch!_

“Fine!” Harrow snapped. She tugged one of the distal bones from her ear and told it to bring her a bowl of snow leek porridge. “Why porridge? I’ve been choking down that sludge my whole life, what if I wanted a steak?”

Harrow had to steady herself on the sink as memories rolled over her in a rush: countless evenings curled up with a bowl of watery, lukewarm clumps while reading in her favorite chair in the library. A lifetime of meals of mediocre slop Harrow had shared with Gideon in contemptuous silence.

“Okay, I get the point. It’s comfort food. But can you use your words next time, Nav?”

_Easier that way._

“For you, maybe, but I’m the one driving the meatsuit.”

When the porridge arrived, Harrow knew immediately that Gideon’s intuition was spot on. Its smell, like steamed socks, was oddly soothing. Then the familiarity of it did something to trigger Harrow’s hunger response, and she was suddenly ravenous. She was shoveling huge greedy bites into her mouth before she’d even sat down. She ate hunched over in the armchair with the bowl balanced on her knees, feeling half feral.

Harrow wondered what had happened to her that she would ever be this relieved to bite into a snow leek. It was beautifully bland, a truly impressive lack of flavor combined with leaves so stringy she had to grind them with her molars to get them down. Her next bite unearthed a slimy, bitter mushroom that was, against all odds, piping hot. Just like the Ninth.

_Ha, it’s even got weird cold patches in it, like the constructs didn’t reheat it all the way._

“Can you taste this?” Harrow asked, when she’d eaten her fill. “Could you taste the breakfast I had with the Emperor?”

_Sort of. Slightly more real than a memory of flavor. And I don’t like the Emperor, by the way. He reminds me of your dad._

Harrow smiled to herself. “He does.”

_Harrow, what do you think you’re doing here? What does he want?_

This matter had been weighing on Harrow since her arrival on the Mithraeum, and after today’s tests, she felt like she was starting to piece together an answer.

“I think Ianthe and I are being drafted in the Cohort, after a fashion. We know there aren’t many surviving lyctors, and the Emperor is ever trying to push the front. It takes a staggering amount of thanergy to sustain what he’s built here. A lot of worlds to harvest. Once we have been trained to his no doubt rigorous standards, and perhaps before then if he’s as shorthanded as I think he is, he may ask us to step into the shoes of a general, or perhaps an ambassador to new conquests.”

_And how do you feel about that?_

“I try not to, Griddle. It’s an immutable fact that I was born into a life of consumption. I cannot exist without the exploitation of others’ energy, but I no longer have the option of _not_ existing, so I must make peace with it or hold my tongue. Do you still want to be a war hero? This may be your chance.”

_I don’t know, maybe. It just seemed like the only option for a while. I love fighting, and I’m damn good at it, but it wouldn’t be the same now. Death has a way of shuffling one’s priorities._

Harrow pushed the last of her porridge around moodily with her spoon, just a few of the gag-worthy mushrooms in cold broth. What could she say to that? To any of this? Her own priorities now seemed so superficial and hollow. What was she doing here?

“I wish you hadn’t done it,” Harrow mumbled, somewhat meekly.

 _Done what?_ the voice responded carefully.

“What else? I wish you hadn’t.” She set her bowl aside and curled up tighter in the chair, sinking into its plush cushions with her knees up to her chest. “You were supposed to be the un-killable one.”

 _Well I made a choice to save you. Us. I thought you’d be happy, this is all you ever talked about wanting._ There was an edge to her voice now. Harrow was too tired to have a fight, but it was what she and Gideon Nav had always been best at, inevitably.

She was right, there. Harrow’s dreams of lyctorhood went back to the first time she’d heard a story about the great necrosaints of old, the nine immortals who helped the Blessed Necrolord Prime in his ascension to absolute power. How mythic, it had all seemed, how noble.

“Maybe I wanted it in the same way you wanted to join the Cohort.”

_And what’s that supposed to mean?_

“It means that we were stupid teenagers not too long ago, and we latched onto the first things that sounded like _freedom_ . I would’ve done anything to save the Ninth from extinction, make it livable. It’s what I was born to do, and now I have a chance at it, but it doesn’t mean _anything_. That place has always been a mass grave, I don’t think it can ever be anything else.”

 _I hate how you explain_ around _things without actually saying them. Go on, just tell me I wasted my life, Harrow._

Harrow snapped. With a feral scream, she hurled her porridge bowl against the far wall, shattering it. She was pacing now, trembling with emotion she’d been bottling up all day. “I didn’t ask you to do that, you insufferably needy moron! I _never_ would’ve asked for this!”

A ribbon of roiling anger in Harrow’s chest splintered off into its own entity, a frantic, writhing thing churning in her soul.

 _I_ died _for you, Nonagesimus!_ _All my life, I did everything for you! EVERYTHING! What more could you possibly want from me??_

“Nothing!!” Harrow screamed. “I don’t _want_ your life! I never did! _I don’t want this!!_ ”

_Oh, hell no. That’s bullshit and we both know it. I have personally suffered the lengths you’d go to get your hooks in me and keep me around, so don’t fucking push me away now._

“I wanted you _alive_ , Nav! I wanted you _with me_!” Harrow scrubbed her hands over her face, which was wet with tears, and gripped tight knucklefuls of her hair.

_I AM with you, idiot! I’m literally as ‘with you’ as it is conceivably possible to be! But you won’t even let me do that! Every time I get close, you stuff my soul down in some dank crypt of the mind or whatever and swallow the key. It’s hell, Harrow! It’s hell watching you run yourself into the ground, when if you’d just let me in, I could do so much for you! With you!_

In her agitated pacing, Harrow stepped on a piece of broken bowl and sliced her foot. “Fuck!” she exclaimed, and kicked it so it splintered again into a dozen more tiny, bloody pieces.

_Harrow, don’t shut me out. We could be SO much together!_

“I DON’T WANT TO BE TWO PEOPLE, GIDEON!”

_WELL, YOU ARE. I’M STUCK WITH YOU JUST AS MUCH AS YOU’RE STUCK WITH ME._

“Because your big dumb hero complex couldn’t resist a damsel in distress!” Harrow sounded hysterical, and was distantly grateful that she’d set up such thorough privacy wards around the room.

_Not just any damsel, you bitch. ONE FLESH, ONE END, remember? You’re my necro. I couldn’t watch you die if I wanted to, and believe me, until recently, I seriously wanted to._

Harrow’s lip quivered, on the brink of another wracking sob. “I just want to be me, Gideon. Lonely, selfish, conniving me. And I want you to be you again, by my side.”

_I’m still me, asshole. Just a bit less corporeal._

“No, Griddle, you’re like a tiger pacing in a cage.” Harrow’s temper had reached the peak of its fever, and she could feel it beginning to circle the drain. “I can sense you, like a tiny sun in my core. You weren’t meant to be stifled in a body like this. You should be overflowing in a vessel with the ability to move like you want it to. I’m just another prison for you.”

It took a moment, but Gideon’s soul simmered down to a hot pressure in Harrow’s chest.

_You’re right. I miss my body, and I’m second-guessing the decision to spend eternity as your personal fuel cell. I’m scared. I’ve known you my whole life, but never like this. You’re a cold, black ocean inside, Harrow, and every time I reach the surface, you shove my head under again._

Harrow sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose. Defeated, she sagged back into the chair. “Well I’m sorry my soul is such an inhospitable wasteland. Are we going to end up like the Third? Or worse, Cytheria?”

_Ease off a bit there, edgelord._

In an odd, tingly, off-centered way, Harrow felt as though Gideon had just settled into the armchair with her. It was inexplicable, the gentle press of the memory of a second spine against her own.

_I don’t know. But I want to make this work. We’ve got about ten thousand years to figure it out before you go off the deep end and murder most of your successors. Are you with me?_

Harrow huffed, because she was too fatigued to laugh. How incessantly practical. “Yes, Griddle. One flesh, one end.”

_Okay. Great. That’s a start. Now will you trust me for a little while?_

“Trust you with what?”

_Tucking you into bed. Today kicked your scrawny little ass, and you’re useless without sleep._

Harrow sniffled and rubbed her crusty, tear-swollen eyes. She knew it was true. “I’m about to say something you’ve only heard in your wildest fantasies, and I want you to try to remain calm. Take me to bed, Gideon Nav.”

_With pleasure, my osseous oligarch._

Harrow smirked, and it was Gideon smirking at the same time.

All the fear Harrow had about losing control of her own body evaporated when she ceded her vice grip on herself. Gideon’s presence felt as though her solid arms were supporting Harrow, lifting her out of her seat, but it wasn’t at all like she’d been pushed aside to make room for Gideon’s consciousness. There seemed to be ample room within herself for two to move together as one.

Harrow stoked the fire, but it was the strength of Gideon’s arm gripping the poker, and it weighed nothing at all. This was still her body, her nervous system piloting it, but a familiar steady momentum not her own was doing the work of making it obey her commands. Perhaps for the first time since her battle with Cytheria the First, Harrowhark felt immortal, almost whole.

Gideon walked them to the bathroom, leaving a trail of sticky red left footprints. Harrow’s foot had healed itself already, but Gideon found a washcloth and swabbed off the flakes of drying blood. After washing, she splashed Harrow’s face clean with cold water, then cupped her hands under the faucet to drink deeply. A headache Harrow had been staunchly ignoring eased up slightly.

Back in the bedroom, Gideon centered herself on Harrow’s feet, inhaled deeply through her nose, out through her mouth, and stretched upwards.

Harrow felt her ribs lock up, and in the same breath, Gideon eased off the stretch.

_You’re stiff as a hanged man, Harrow._

“And you better not hijack my meat to work out in the middle of the night.”

Gideon leaned down to touch her toes, and stopped when Harrow’s calves screamed in protest, still far from the floor.

_Fair, but you know they’re gonna expect you to at least be able to prance around with a rapier eventually. If you let me help next time, we could make some sick gains. Maybe someday you’ll even bench the bar._

Gideon continued stretching, as much as Harrow’s anemic muscles would comfortably allow.

“You just wanted to drag me through your nightly workout, didn’t you?” Harrow accused, and stifled a yawn.

_Yep. And it’s not gonna be the last time. You need to learn to take care of yourself._

“Doesn’t matter, I’m immortal.”

_And I won’t let you spend the next dozen myriads gnawing on bones for sustenance and getting beat up by backstabbing princesses._

They pulled back the covers and Harrow crawled underneath, curling into a heap of exhausted limbs.

 _Goodnight, my immortal imperatrix_.

“G’night, Griddle,” Harrow mumbled, and sank like a stone into deep, deep sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies to the first gen lyctors that I didn't care enough to give them names. But this is a very self-indulgent story about a pair of immortal lesbians learning how to share a body, not the ancient, bitter assholes tasked with babysitting them. They'll live.
> 
> Fun fact, 'stiff as a hanged man' refers to the tendency of gallows victims to sport truly outrageous erections postmortem. I like to think Gideon is full of obscure death-related innuendos.
> 
> Kudos/comments/critiques/etc are welcome. I thrive on tormenting these characters, but feedback is nice too.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW for Ch. 4: body image/dysphoria/depersonalization talk, but in a chill way cause this is the happy ending chapter.

* * *

“ _ Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us. _  
_ These, our bodies, possessed by light. _  
_ Tell me we’ll never get used to it. _ ”

— Richard Siken, “Scheherazade”

* * *

Harrowhark woke in the dark before First Bell. She hadn’t dreamed of Gideon Nav. She hadn’t dreamed of the Locked Tomb. For the first time since she was ten, Harrow hadn’t dreamed at all. It was staggering how well-rested she was.

Her limbs felt heavy and pliable, all her senses dulled like they were filtering through the downy bulk of her comforter. She was curled loosely on her side, and at her back, she dimly felt a warm weight in the bed next to her, pressing gently against her awareness. With a yawn, Harrow rolled towards the warmth and nuzzled into it, groping sleepily at the other pillow.

It was cold. The other half of her bed was as empty as when she’d crawled across it the night before.

“Right,” she sighed, and sat up, peering through the doorway into the main room. Yesterday, there had been a slim letter pushed under her door, bearing a summons for testing in the Emperor’s ornate penmanship. Today, nothing. Seems she had to occupy her own time this morning.

Perhaps today was finally the day she’d be brave enough to go through Gideon’s stuff. Not much had been recovered from Canaan House, no new bodies at least, but the Ninth’s surviving possessions had been delivered to her room in her cavalier’s battered old duffel bag. Cross-legged on the floor, Harrow began the process of emptying it.

On top were a few sets of her own robes, which seemed impossibly grey and shabby compared to the clothes supplied for her by the Emperor. After checking the pockets for odd bones, she tossed these aside. Next, Gideon’s spare clothes.

“Don’t judge me,” Harrow said to the room, then buried her face in the dark folds of her cavalier’s threadbare jacket. She breathed deep.

_ Oh, I’m judging. What do I smell like? _

Gideon’s voice was small and sly, a tickle in her ear that set the tiny hairs on her neck on end.

Harrow wrinkled her nose. “Like you haven’t washed this ratty old thing once since you got it.” It was true, the fabric mostly reeked of stale sweat, and had the general air of embalming fluids that permeated everything of the Ninth House. But there was something else there, maybe a lingering trace of Gideon’s deodorant, that could almost be construed as pleasantly nostalgic. Harrow folded the jacket carefully along its seams and set it aside.

Most of Harrow’s belongings were osseous in nature, and could be sorted into the supplies cabinet in her study. There was a small, paint-stained cosmetics bag and a few tattered books that she set next to Gideon’s jacket to keep, but not much else.

Gideon’s belongings were equally sparse: a greasy cloth wrapped around a jar of the foul-smelling stuff she polished her weapons with; a plastic bag full of dirty magazines, each lovingly dogeared to her favorite pages; a few assorted toiletries she’d never use again; and her trusty hair clippers.

Harrow grinned.  _ Oh, bless you, Nav, _ she thought. “Hey Gideon, can I use these?” she asked, holding them up as if her cavalier didn’t already know what was in her hands. Harrow had stolen these exact clippers dozens of times before back on the Ninth, not because she couldn’t acquire a pair of her own, but because it was always more fun to take Gideon’s stuff. She’d always given them back, though, because  _ someone _ got very irritable when she couldn’t keep her undercut looking sharp.

_ Hang on, I gotta save the date. I think this is the first time you’ve  _ ever _ asked before borrowing my shit. _

“Don’t get too excited, I’m using them regardless.”

_ You know, with your hair this scruffy, you look kind of cute. In a sick-rodent-that-got-electrocuted sort of way. _

Harrow packed up the items she’d decided to keep and returned the duffel bag to its place in the back of the closet. “You know, Ianthe Tridentarius said the same thing, but nicer. Which is why the scruff has to go.”

When she took the guard off the clippers, Harrow discovered that there were still a few tawny red strands of hair stuck between the blades. Normally, it would infuriate her that Gideon never cleaned them, knowing full well Harrow used them when she wasn’t around (and Gideon no doubt left them messy on purpose for that reason). But this morning, the sight stopped her in her tracks.

Gideon’s body still hadn’t been recovered. Or for some reason, the Emperor was keeping knowledge of its whereabouts secret from Harrow. It struck her in a sickening wave that this might be all she would ever see of her cavalier’s mortal form, ever again.

With slightly shaking fingers, Harrow fumbled through the racks of jewelry by the sink. The vast majority of it was bone, but there were a few family heirlooms in the mix, including a small memento mori locket in which she kept a tiny pinch of Ninth House soil.

This, she dumped unceremoniously in the sink. Then, Harrow set about plucking every last red hair from the clipper blades and twisting them together into a delicate little fiery curl. The locket was shaped like a skull, carved out of translucent smoky quartz. With Gideon’s hair laid carefully inside and the minute lock on the hinge snapped shut, the dull stone seemed to glow with a faint internal heat, eye sockets flashing in the light.

Gideon’s voice rang with amusement.  _ I’m kinda surprised you didn’t already have a lock of my hair stashed away somewhere, Nonagesimus. _

Harrow settled the locket around her neck, where it hung heavy against her breastbone, parallel to her heart. “Never needed to, it wouldn’t have been any use to me until you died.”

_ But now you’re sentimental. It’s sweet. _

Harrow scowled at her reflection. “It’s practical. You never had a lick of necromantic sense so you wouldn't know, but even human keratin has a myriad of uses in the right hands.”

_ Just admit you’ve gone soft on me. _

Harrow turned on the clippers to drown out the voice in the back of her mind before her cavalier could embarrass her further.

While Gideon had always made the time and effort to give herself actual haircuts that looked  _ good _ , Harrow was more concerned with making her personal grooming routine as minimalist as possible. Unceremoniously, she scrubbed the clippers over her scalp, with the end result being a glorified buzzcut that was just long enough to lay flat against her skull.

“Much better,” she told her reflection, smoothing her palm over the stubble at the base of her neck. It was only then that she realized that her hair hadn’t been the only thing off about her appearance. Something was wrong with her eyes.

Harrow leaned in so her nose was almost touching the mirror and pulled her eyelids away from her irises. Normally, her eyes were such a deep, uniform umber that they looked black in most light, but sure enough, there was a thin corona of gold creeping in around her pupils. It streaked outwards in a faint halo of luminous amber. Harrow blinked away stinging moisture as it welled up.

“Griddle… Is that you?” she asked.

_ Looks like it _ , she responded in an equally curious tone.  _ Remember how Ianthe’s eyes changed? I guess this is normal. _

“Well, what if I don’t want your eyes?” Harrow grumbled, though it was all show. Secretly, she’d always found Gideon’s eyes to be the most striking and alluring color she’d ever seen. When they were young, she’d been incredibly jealous of them, which evolved as they grew up into a strong aversion to making any direct eye contact with her.

_ So I’ve been thinking, Harrow… _ Gideon began while her necromancer finished her morning routine.  _ You know how Cytheria said it took her and her cavalier centuries to get used to lyctorhood? _

That statement had been the cause of much anxiety for Harrow over the last few days, echoing cruelly around her brain. “I vaguely recall something to that effect,” she replied carefully.

_ I think we both assumed it was her cavalier who was struggling, like what we saw with the Third. But I feel… weirdly fine. Like, I should  _ NOT _ be as chill about this as I am. _

“You’re probably still in shock, but go on.” Harrow was grateful that Gideon was taking this in stride and serving as a voice of reason, though it was an uncanny reversal of their typical roles. 

_ So maybe it’s  _ you  _ who’s having a hard time adjusting. All I had to do was die, but you’re the one who’s gotta cope with life eternal now, and you’ve got a whole extra soul cluttering up your subconscious. Seems to me like you've been spinning out a bit lately. _

Harrow pursed her lips. “I thought we’d already come to that conclusion together last night, Griddle. But thanks for reminding me of how many expectations I’m not living up to.”

_ Let me finish. I want to do something to help you get to know me better, strike a balance. Maybe this will be a little less weird for you if you’re more familiar with the soul handcuffed to yours. _

“I have a feeling I won’t like whatever scheme you’ve got cooking in there.”

_ Probably not. I want to teach you how to use my sword. _

Harrow didn’t need long to mull this proposition over. “Fine. It’s a good idea, Griddle. I’ll need all the help I can get.”

_ Oh. That was easy. _

“I’m just sorry I couldn’t admit it sooner. Where do we begin?”

* * *

Necro Bootcamp, as Gideon had christened it, began in Harrow’s front room that very morning.

_ It’s a good thing you cleared the floor,  _ Gideon said. She’d instructed Harrow to start off by standing in the center of the room with longsword in hand, and to hold it out as far as she could reach and spin in a circle until she couldn’t touch anything with the point of the blade on any side. No sense in carving up the walls like she had the end table.

“I had to,” Harrow huffed, trying not to let on how much exertion this simple task required. “The decor reminded me of my great aunts’ living room.” Unable to keep the blade extended any longer, Harrow let it fall to her side.

_ Okay, first things first. Where the fuck was your center of gravity just then? _

“What? In my feet, where it belongs?”

Gideon groaned.  _ Don’t be dense, Nonagesimus. Of course all your weight is supported on your feet, but that shouldn’t be your center. Lift the sword again, hold it out as far and straight as you can _ .

It was Harrow’s turn to groan, but she did as she was told. Her arms burned, and her knees locked up with the effort it took to keep from overbalancing.

_ Alright, now try bending your knees slightly, but keep the sword up. _

Harrow did so, and what happened next felt like magic. With that simple shift in posture, she felt a dozen strained joints slide into their proper places, and the screaming load on her skeleton lifted, distributed much more evenly between muscles she hadn’t even realized she had. From her heels up through her thighs, deep in her gut and spreading through her low back, Harrow’s body felt as though it could stand through a hurricane.

_ Better, right? Now where’s your center? _

Harrow nodded. “Closer to my hips, I think.” She experimentally shifted her weight from foot to foot, and began to recognize the subtle sway of some internal pendulum that kept her on solid footing. It was no doubt a subconscious mechanism she’d always possessed, but she’d never given much thought to how and why her body moved the way it did, or where its momentum came from. She tended to view her body more like scaffolding that her soul was propped up with for the moment, not a dynamic, malleable part of herself.

_ Before you even think about doing anything strenuous, make sure you’re balanced. Even if you can’t build much muscle mass, you can do a hell of a lot more with your body if you remember that. A grounded stance means it’ll be harder to knock you off your feet, which will help your stamina and defense. Now try swinging the sword. _

Harrow tried, and her wrists screamed with effort. “Your sword is heavy, Griddle,” she gritted out through clenched teeth.

_ That’s the point, my delicate undead snowflake. If you want to dance around with a sharpened feather, use a rapier. Longswords are meant to have some heft, and it makes them a more versatile weapon. But more heft means you need to learn how to use the weapon's weight to your advantage. Right now, you’re trying to hold it with just your arms, why don’t you let your core do the lifting instead? Bring the hilt towards your center. _

It chaffed against every ounce of Harrow’s beings to let Griddle boss her around like this, but she swallowed her indignation and withdrew her reach. When it wasn’t extended fully, the weight of the blade shifted towards the hilt, where she could grip and control it better. She shuffled on her feet, bringing that internal pendulum back to center now that it held the added weight of a large weapon. Sure enough, with the strain taken off her forearms, her upper body picked up the effort much easier.

“Griddle, as much fun as it is to stand around with a sword in my hands, I’ll need more than balance exercises to be of much use in a real fight.”

Gideon laughed, a bright, dissonant rumble that Harrow felt in her chest. _You think_ this _is boring? I was doing nothing but strength training drills for_ years _before Aiglamene let me pick up a real sword. You’ve got it easy, Nonagesimus._ _Just accept that you’re going to be a useless baby for a while, or I’ll start assigning pushups every time you complain._

Harrow scowled. “Try not to sound so smug about it.”

_ Try and stop me. Now thrust forward and up, try to keep the hilt on the same axis as your front leg. Like so. _

Harrow extended her arms again, and felt the gentle tidal pull of Gideon’s presence telling her where to put her weight. With proper technique, Harrow was surprised at the force and precision she lunged with, and at how little her body protested the movement.

_ I’m not gonna fuel your ego by telling you you’re a natural, which you aren’t, but there might be hope for you yet, necro.  _

Harrow smiled to herself. She’d take what she could get.

Over the next hour or so, Gideon walked Harrow slowly through what she assured her necromancer was the most child-friendly drill in her arsenal.  _ Block. Lunge. Parry. Strike. _ The repetition was mind-numbing, and Harrow’s whole body was sore by the end of it, but she was beginning to understand the scope of what went into a cavalier’s swordsmanship. At least on a theoretical level, if not yet in practice.

“I have to give you credit, Nav,” Harrow said after they’d sheathed the sword and cleaned up post-workout. “There’s a certain science to brawling.”

_ I’d argue that it’s an art more than a science, but sure.  _

Harrow’s stomach grumbled, her sluggish metabolism unaccustomed to how active she’d been the last few days. “Is this why you were always stuffing your face, Griddle?”

_ Yep. Not sure how it works for lyctors, but most bodies tend to work better when they’ve got fuel to burn. _

Harrow wondered what sort of pastries the kitchen constructs were working on this morning. She painted her face, donned her sweeping black robes, and headed for the door. But she hesitated when she reached for her jawbone key and accidentally brushed the memento mori she’d made for Gideon that morning.

“Thank you, Griddle,” she said, slowly, so she could be certain she meant every word. “For...” It seemed redundant and insincere to keep thanking her for  _ everything _ .

“Thank you for your life. And for helping me. I don’t deserve it, and I still think your faith in me is misplaced, but… it’s nice. You make me believe I have a chance at earning your sacrifice, someday.”

Harrow thought that if Gideon still had shoulders, she’d be shrugging them.

“I mean it. I would be nothing without you, Gideon Nav.”

Was that embarrassment Harrow felt, flushing the tips of her ears?

_ Okay, okay. I can only handle so much groveling. Let’s get you some breakfast. _

"Sure, breakfast. And then I'm going to hunt down someone on this ship who can fix your sword." Harrow turned the doorknob, but paused before opening it. “One more thing, Griddle.”

_ Uggggh. Ten words or less. _

Harrow smiled to herself and stepped through the doorway. “I think we’re going to be okay.”

Nestled next to her own soul, a presence like late afternoon sunshine swelled with contentment and draped its warm aura around her.

_ I think so, too, Harrow. _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, thanks for reading to the end! I hope this mess was an enjoyable mess. Kudos/comments/critiques/etc are always welcome! :)
> 
> On a closing note, here's a quote (from C.S. Lewis' 'The Four Loves') that served as original inspiration for this fic, but didn't end up making it into the final draft:
> 
> "There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket - safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell."


End file.
